Archive for May, 2019

Whilst we’d flown into Madrid on this break, I’m much happier staying somewhere less busy and so Jen and I spent five nights about an hour away in Segovia. It’s just like most other Spanish towns in that the historic centre remains intact, with the usual castle and cathedral, but it has the added attraction of a Roman aquaduct. Apparently there is no mortar between the blocks and all of them are held in place by nothing more than gravity. I’ve worked on plenty of construction projects that skimped on materials like that too.

A further benefit of basing ourselves in Segovia was that it was on the route of the Madrid to Santiago de Compostela Camino. Never heard of it? Me neither, I’d thought it started in France, but it turns out that there are loads of different pilgrim trails to Santiago de Compostela.

This meant that we had two easy options for going for a walk. On the morning of the match we struck out in the direction of Madrid, walked along the route for a couple of hours and then retraced our steps back into town. We didn’t see much in the way of wildlife, unless cows count, but there was a decent mountain in view for the outward stretch.

Next day we walked towards Santiago de Compostela. We cheated a bit by driving to Zamarramala and starting from there but it cut out the urban section of the walk and a big hill. We walked for a few hours to Los Huertos and back, stopping in the same cafe for breakfast on the way out and then lunch on the way back.

This time we had views of fields, with the track stretching out in front of us into the distance and the odd hawk hovering overhead.

Having exhausted the easy Camino options we decided to our next walk should be at the snow covered mountain that we’d had as the backdrop. It was a few miles away in the Sierra de Guadarrama National Park and peaked at around 1800m. It seemed a good idea initially but without spikes it was fairly treacherous underfoot. After a series of slips we drove back down the hill a couple of hundred metres until we got below the snow line and then did a few miles along a forest track instead.

So, Segovia has some decent historical features and it’s a great base for a walking holiday. It’s also famous for suckling pig, although I thought the ones that we had were too old at six weeks. I prefer the two week old ones with the thinner skin that we get in KL. Segovia has some decent bars too and we visited just about all of them.

Fortunately it also has a football team, Gimnastica Segoviana, that plays in the fourth-tier Tercera Division. Just as fortunately, they were playing at home during our stay, although good planning on my part in selecting Segovia as our destination might actually have had more to do with it.

The six and a half thousand capacity Estadio La Albuera is on the edge of town and as four hours walking earlier in the day was enough we took the car. There wasn’t much of a queue at the hole in the wall ticket window and we picked up a couple of eight euro tickets for the stand on the far side.

I’ve no idea how well attended Segoviana’s games usually are or whether the fact that their opponents, La Granja, are from just a few minutes drive away had made a difference, but there was a lengthy queue to get through the gates.

Once inside we walked around the back of the goal which, just like the other end, had no seats or terracing. There were barriers though, so anyone wanting to stand could get close up to the action.

Our stand seemed to be the popular one and we had to walk the full length of it, passing the counter that was serving alcohol free beer and low strength Radler shandy, to find an area with few people in it. To our left we had the local ultras, some of whom preferred to face away from the pitch so that they could better coordinate the singing.

I didn’t notice any La Granja fans, but even with the traditional reluctance of Spanish fans to travel away, you’d think some would have made the effort to make the short trip.

The main stand opposite us looked a lot older than our section and I think is the one original stand remaining, which dates it to the stadium opening in 1978. It holds around about 600 and from what I could hear it had the benefit of a lack of drums.

Anyway, enough about the ground. It’s the shirts that made my afternoon. Not so much Gimnastica, who were turned out in an unimaginative Barcelona style kit, brightened up with a Burger King logo.

La Granja, though, had oddest shirt I’d ever seen. At first glance I thought it featured peanuts or maybe potatoes. After a closer look I concluded that it was probably baked beans. Eventually, after some zoomed in photography I spotted small morsels of pork among the beans, so presumably it was some sort of stew, possibly a dish that their village regards as their local speciality. No doubt there will be a parmo shirt somewhere in the Boro’s future.

La Granja’s play was as bad as their kit. Their defence didn’t have much confidence in their keeper and panicked whenever they thought he might be given something to do. Further upfield was a diminutive number ten with a temper as short as his stature and who looked unlikely to go the distance. Somewhat surprisingly, Segoviana failed to take advantage and the teams went in level at the end of a goalless first half.

With the sun getting lower and in our eyes, we took the opportunity to switch to the opposite side of the ground for some second half shade. As we made the move we got a decent view of the hills from the steps at the end of the stand.

We started off inside the barrier, leaning back against it but were soon moved behind the railings by someone dressed up as if he were on the coaching staff but who was actually turned out to be little more than a fifty year old ball boy. The change of location gave us frequent close ups of the right back for La Granja being given the runaround.

The game remained goalless until twenty minutes from the end when an indirect free kick missed everything but the visiting keeper‘s fingertips. If he’d been just that little bit more hapless then he would have got away with it.

The goal seemed to intensify the bad feeling between the keeper and his defence. One fella was in a constant state of fury because the goalie would never play it short to him. Bizarrely, the first time the keeper did throw him the ball was from a goal kick. The defender just blasted the ball back at him in frustration. On taking the goal kick correctly, the keeper found his man again only for Mr. Angry to let it roll under his foot and out for a throw in.

There was some quality from the home side though in the final moments as one of their strikers ran from deep leaving at least three La Granja defenders floundering. He rode their increasingly wilder lunges, kept his feet and then twatted the ball home with the keeper getting his fingers nowhere near this time. The two-nil win for Segoviana and the stew on the visitor’s shirts will have given the headline writers an easy caption.

It’s always good to squeeze in a holiday in Spain and as Madrid is one of the airports that works well for our route we broke our journey back to the UK with a few nights in nearby Segovia. Madrid works well for football too and a mid-morning arrival fitted in very nicely with the lunchtime game at Getafe. Well, lunchtime for me anyway. I doubt many Spaniards would think of one o’clock as being anything more than time for a late breakfast.

I’d checked the Getafe attendances and even with them in the dizzy heights of a Champions League spot they hadn’t been anywhere near selling out their seventeen thousand capacity Estadio Coliseum Alfonso Perez. Whilst that meant that I could have bought a ticket at the stadium office I had a crack at their mainly Spanish website and booked my seat in advance instead.

Forty euros got me a spot at the front of the upper tier in the Lateral Alta which is the uncovered stand along the side, opposite the covered main stand. Forty euros is way more than Jen considers good value for somewhere to spend an hour and a half knitting and so I left her in a nearby coffee shop and followed the crowd up the hill to the ground.

The stadium is just over twenty years old and oddly it seems to be named after a former player. Not a former Getafe player but someone from Getafe who turned out mainly for Real Betis. Even odder is that Senor Perez is only forty-six now and so had a ground that he apparently never played at named in his honour whilst in his mid-twenties. Why would you do that? It’s like us naming the Riverside after Keith Houchen or Robbie Blake and I don’t remember either of those names even making the voting shortlist.

I entered the ground at the main stand and walked around behind the goal before being directed to my seat in the sun. It has been a bit chilly earlier on but the lack of shade meant that I was overdressed in a jumper and jacket.

Getafe were in blue with fellow Madrid-based team Rayo Vallecano sporting a Peru kit. Whilst Getafe were having about as good as season as you can get, the visitors were struggling at the other end of the table and came into the game on the back of a run of three defeats.

Mata opened the scoring for Getafe half an hour in, taking the ball across the goal before turning and wellying it into the far top corner. It sparked mass scarf twirling from the home fans and a blast of The Final Countdown from the speakers.

There were no more goals before the break and my seat gave me pole position for getting in the queue for a coke and a bacon sandwich.

With a crowd of only eleven thousand I took advantage of the available seating to find a different vantage point for the second half, moving to the back row behind the goal to my left. There was a welcome breeze blowing in and I was able to stand and lean against the perimeter wall.

Getafe seemed well on top but were caught out when de Tomas equalised with a well placed shot from the edge of the D. It was at the opposite end to me but I reckon it bounced a couple of times before crossing the line and the keeper should probably have done a bit better with it.

The goal was enough for a handful of home fans to head for the exits despite there still being half an hour to go. Fourth in the league and drawing an hour into a game obviously isn’t acceptable to some people.

It was a shame for those that cleared off when they did as it didn’t take Getafe long to regain the lead and clinch the points. Mata broke free and unselfishly squared for Molina to tap into an empty net. Scoring the winner earned Molina a rendition of the Nicky Bailey song as he was subbed off a few minutes later. Possibly with a few lyrical amendments.

The result kept both teams in their pre-match positions, with Getafe still on course for the Champions League and Rayo eyeing up a swift return to the Segunda Division.